The Daily - The Sunday Read: 'Why Was Joshua Held for More Than Two Years for Someone Else’s Crimes?'

Episode Date: August 7, 2022

The more he insisted that his name was Joshua, the more delusional he came to be seen.Journalist Robert Kolker tells us the remarkable story of Joshua Spriestersbach, a homeless man who wound up serving more than two years in a Honolulu jail for crimes committed by someone else.It was a case of mistaken identity that developed into “a slow-motion game of hot potato between the police, the courts, the jails and the hospitals,” Mr. Kolker writes. He delves into how homelessness and mental illness shaped Mr. Spriestersbach’s adult life, two factors that led him into a situation in which he had little control — a bureaucratic wormhole that commandeered and consumed two and a half years of his life.This story was written by Robert Kolker and recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

Even in this day and age, it's frighteningly easy for someone to slip away from society who gravely needs help. And our bureaucracies that have been created to grant help are still woefully inadequate. This is the story of a homeless man named Joshua. I wrote about him recently for the New York Times Magazine. Joshua. I wrote about him recently for the New York Times magazine. Joshua lived on the streets of Honolulu, leading a pretty peaceful life. He was non-violent, and he didn't abuse drugs or alcohol. But he suffered from schizophrenia. He managed to stay out of trouble for the most part, with the exception of the few times when he was picked up by the police for things like sleeping on a park bench or in someone's backyard. But one day in 2017, while standing in line on the sidewalk for a soup kitchen, the police nabbed Joshua, seemingly for no reason.

Joshua spends four months in jail. He gets transferred to a state psychiatric hospital, and it's only there that he understands that the police have been working off of a bench warrant, an outstanding arrest for somebody who had stolen a truck, used cocaine, and violated probation. Joshua protests and says, I'm not that guy. I never did any of these things. But no one believes him. And for close to two and a half years, Joshua languishes in this psychiatric facility, even though he continues to insist he is not the man they were looking for. That is, until by almost impossible luck, one hospital worker learns through the simple act of looking up past records that Joshua was telling the truth all along. They had the wrong guy.

The question this story asks is, what kind of system would allow this to happen? How come no one, from the prosecutors and public defenders to the people who worked in the jail and the state psychiatric hospital, how come for more than two years, no one caught the arrow?

My name is Robert Kolker, and I'm a contributor to the magazine. I'm also an author who writes frequently about severe mental illness and complicated court cases and governmental corruption. This story takes place in Hawaii, but it's really a story that could take place anywhere in the country. We've all seen how homelessness is on the rise. We've all read about how the mental health system is broken and that it's not really a system at all. Nobody at the hospital really took time to check Joshua's fingerprints or look at the photograph of the person they were supposed to arrest or investigate Joshua's past at all to see if his story checked out. And that's because they didn't

think it was their job. They thought their job was to do what the court told them to do, which was to deal with somebody with a serious mental illness who was caught up in the criminal justice system. I pieced together details of Joshua's life by talking to hospital workers and going through about 1,700 pages of his medical records. I thought that writing about him would be a way to help people understand that the next time they walk past someone who seems disturbed on the street, this person has a story too. So here's my article. Why was Joshua held for more than two years for someone else's crimes?

Read by Eduardo Ballerini. That's A-U-D-M dot com for more details. On May 11, 2017, the River of Life mission in Honolulu's Chinatown was serving food, when a 46-year-old man named Joshua Spriestersbach lined up. For more than a century, the neighborhood has been a gathering place for the city's homeless, its sidewalks often jammed with people sleeping, sometimes setting up encampments for days or longer. A variety of organizations have sprung up to attack root causes, meth addiction, mental illness, lack of housing.

But the most reliable meal service came from the River of Life, a charity with a storefront a few blocks from the harbor that always draws a line around the block. Spreester's Bach was a regular. He would go from the park to the soup kitchen and back again, never without a newsboy cap, never interacting with anyone if he could help it. On that day in May, he was sitting on the sidewalk when a police officer approached

him and placed him under arrest. There'd been no altercation, no incident, no fight. Later, he would say he thought it was because he fell asleep in line. Spreester's Bach was just over six feet tall, thin and blonde, with sharp cheekbones and pale skin, a look that, on the sidewalks and in the parks of Honolulu, marked him as a haole, not a native. He was first diagnosed with schizophrenia in the late 1990s. He spoke of microwaves controlling him and others, and insisted that the CIA needed his computer hacking skills. And for close to a dozen years he'd been homeless,

living on sidewalks and streets and in parks in Hawaii, first on the Big Island and now Oahu. In all that time he lived out of reach from his family, never contacting them and making it difficult, if not impossible, for them to find him. They never stopped imagining where he might be, with any number of terrible scenarios playing out in their minds, and in some ways he was living out a version of them. As someone who was homeless and living with a mental illness, Spriestersbach had been cycling through jails, mental health facilities, and the court system, a pattern that plays out all the time nationally in the absence of a mental health care system that can address severe illnesses in a meaningful way.

Spreester's box's main contact with the outside world, aside from the soup kitchen, seemed to be the police. He would be picked up for sleeping on park benches or in people's backyards. Drugs and alcohol weren't part of his particular set of problems, and neither was fighting or stealing, so his offenses never

amounted to much he would be let off with a warning or directed to a shelter like a lot of homeless and mentally ill people he resisted offers of help he would take any donation of food but would then go on his way determined to live on his own he would most often identify himself by another name which in turn made it even more difficult for his family to find him. His first trip to jail in Hawaii was in February 2009, after a police officer in Hilo, on the Big Island, found him sleeping on private property. He was arrested and charged with trespassing, a misdemeanor, and sent to the local jail. For someone like him, disheveled, often delusional,

no home or resources or known family, unable to afford a lawyer, the usual tactic was for a public defender to request to have him declared not competent to face his charges.

It's a denial of due process to prosecute those unable to rationally understand the case against them. And so while anyone else picked up on the same offense might have been released in a matter of weeks or even days, Spriester's box sat in jail for two months,

keeping to himself, until the court finally declared him unfit to proceed, a 406 in the system's jargon. That was just the beginning. Now that he was unfit, the system's job was to try to restore him to competency, so that he could face his charges the system's job was to try to restore him to competency so that he could face his charges in court. But the task of treating the incompetent to stand trial is where the system, such as it is, quite often breaks down. Before long, it isn't what they did to get arrested that's keeping them confined.

It's the slow process of restoring their competence with spotty results. If they land in a hospital, they see a battery of social workers and nurses and psychiatrists, all aiming to restore competency. In April 2009, Spreester's Buck was taken from the Big Island to Oahu, to the admission unit of the state's only public psychiatric facility, Hawaii State Hospital, a sprawling campus of buildings in Kaneohe, About ten miles from Honolulu Like a lot of public mental health facilities across the country

HSH is overcrowded and understaffed It was meant to have around 170 beds But recently accommodated more than 230 Accounts from current and former staff members Describe closets being renovated And windows being popped into windowless rooms To make them bedrooms, while the number of psychiatrists has dwindled from 16 to as low as 10 or 11. Keeping tabs on every patient has only gotten tougher, too. In 2017, one patient, there since 1981 after committing murder, left the hospital, took a cab to the airport, and eventually flew

to San Jose. It took more than eight hours to report the escape and three days to find him. With almost no exceptions, every patient at HSH has come in through the court system. Some have committed violent offenses. Others, like Spreistersbach, have broken some small rule. The staff's job is to help them all become mentally fit to face their charges in court. From the moment he arrived at HSH, Spriestersbach resisted being there. The staff remembers him as mild, withdrawn, clearly smart,

but also steadfastly non-cooperative. To every question, he responded, Name, rank, serial number. That's all I have to give. In a handwritten note that he asked to be passed on to the court, he wrote, Patience writes, I request my triad junctorial assets in order to pursue my constitutional right to tribunal and duel. At this time, I'd like to submit my no-contest plea to an M1313. He signed it, Sergeant Wolfgang Charles Castleberry,

adding what seemed meant to be a National Security Agency identification number. He was sent to the hospital's acute stabilization unit, while the doctors tried in vain to get more information on his past or his condition, or to get him to accept treatment. At the bottom of his initial evaluation in 2009, a staff psychiatrist wrote that his expected stay at HSH would be 120 days, the maximum amount of time the state law allowed the hospital to keep someone charged with a nonviolent misdemeanor. Spreister's Bach couldn't be sent back to jail because of his mental illness,

and he couldn't be forcibly medicated because he was not dangerous. And so he seemed destined to remain stuck in the hospital. Here was the heart of the morass, which engulfs an estimated tens of thousands of mentally ill people in America. While others serve just a few days or pay a fine, someone with a mental health condition can end up detained for months. Spreistersbach declined all drugs throughout his stay. Leading up to his discharge in July 2009, a hospital social worker tried to line up benefits, but Spreistersbach

would not sign the forms. Setting him up in a group home was also not an option. Refusing all help, he gathered his possessions in his backpack and left, with just $29 to his name. his possessions in his backpack and left, with just $29 to his name. The patient's prognosis is viewed as poor, the discharge plan read. The staff knew it would happen again, and they were right. Three years later, Spriestersbach was jailed for trespassing, this time for sleeping on the property of a middle school. Again, he called himself Castleberry, refused treatment, and kept to himself.

Again, he was declared a 406, unfit to proceed, and languished in jail, this time for seven months, before being transferred to HSH for an expected 120 days. When he was released on January 18, 2013, Spriestersbach remained, in this way, a perfect public policy problem. Lucid enough to live on his own, independent-minded enough to refuse treatment, and though not without his quirks, decidedly non-confrontational. Then in 2017, sitting in line outside the River of Life mission, Spriestersbach encountered yet another police officer.

The cycle seemed to be playing out as expected, a slow-motion game of hot potato between the police, the courts, the jails, and the hospitals. But this time, Spriestersbach's alias, Castleberry, became the strange wellspring of an error, first made by the police, and then compounded by the courts and the state hospital system, and even his own lawyers,

that would propel Spriestersbach into an entirely different bureaucratic wormhole that commandeered and consumed the next two and a half years of his life. The debate in America over how to best help homeless people with mental illness has been left largely unresolved for decades, ever since the closing and shrinking of the mid-20th century's massive state mental hospitals transformed jails and prisons into the nation's largest de facto mental health holding centers. In 1955, the United States had more than 550,000 state and county psychiatric beds. By 2017, the number of beds, including those at other inpatient facilities like private hospitals and 24-hour treatment centers, was around only 170,000. Deinstitutionalization is widely viewed as the great original sin of our current mental health crisis, not because the institutions were the right idea,

but because it was assumed that medications could replace them. In fact, medication, while a miracle for managing many mental health conditions, has failed to change outcomes for people with severe mental illness. While the more drastic outward symptoms of schizophrenia, for instance, can be muffled with antipsychotic medication, many patients suffer from physical and cognitive side effects, and the root condition typically is not reversed. In retrospect, it seemed unrealistic to expect that prescriptions would solve the problem. Severe mental illness is the furthest thing

from a cookie-cutter condition. A diagnosis of schizophrenia means different symptoms for different patients, and no patient responds to medication in quite the same way. In recent years, the debates over what to do with mentally ill people tend to fixate on two extremes. There are the wrongfully committed, those whose relatively benign behavior, like, say, sleeping outside, ends up criminalized when no one else is willing to take them in. These people seem almost destined to return to the hospital, even if, in the words of one former staff member at HSH, they really don't

present an imminent danger to themselves or others. They fall asleep on someone's lawn, or stop taking their prescribed medications and decompensate, or start taking recreational drugs that trigger their mental illness. Their problems are less psychiatric than social. Sometimes people come in because they lack housing, they don't have finances, they don't have supportive networks, they don't have insurance. If they weren't homeless, they wouldn't need to be there. Then there are the acute cases,

who, lacking inpatient options, one day explode into violence, harming innocent people. New York City, despite the forced treatment legislation known as Kendra's Law, has made the news with two tragic cases just this year. Michelle Goh, fatally pushed onto the subway tracks, and Christina Yunalee, followed home and stabbed to death. While the murders have the marks of anti-Asian violence, the perpetrators also each suffered from severe mental illness and had cycled through facilities for years.

Hawaii had a tragedy of its own this year, the case of Michael Armstrong, who on the day after Valentine's Day bludgeoned another mentally ill person, Linda Johnson, steps from the entrance of the Kapolei police station. Armstrong, his father told reporters, had been on conditional release, an option for discharging patients who had been acquitted by reason of insanity, for 15 years. Living in a series of group homes, yet always

decompensating and committing more serious crimes. The most dreadful incidents get attention for obvious reasons, though they are by no means typical. A 2019 report for the Federal Department of Health and Human Services indicated that while an estimated one in five Americans suffers from some form of mental illness, only about four percent of community violence is attributable to psychopathology. What both benign and acute cases have in common is an absence of attention. Without a coherent system of mental health care, homeless people with mental illness are swept out of view, either incarcerated, ignored, or passed through the revolving door from social service agency to jail to psychiatric hospital, then back to an agency again.

Sadly, some of the same people that I worked with 20 years ago when I first came out of my training are still on the streets, Chad Koyanagi, a Hawaii psychiatrist who specializes in homeless outreach, told me. In the course of, say, five years, one of these folks can be in and out of corrections five or ten times, and they might have been assigned to five or ten different agencies. They may get arrested for fairly trivial offenses like illegal camping or misdemeanor theft. The arrest cuts them off from the social services they had been receiving. They lose their Medicaid benefits, which their case management is based off of, and once they get released, they're homeless. The pattern is predictable, Koyanagi said,

and demoralizing. A hallmark of schizophrenia is the lack of insight. You believe your delusions to be reality and cannot be persuaded otherwise. And so persistent conditions like Spreester's Box are almost fated to be criminalized. Koyanagi sees many outreach workers from social services and mental health organizations gravitating toward the easier cases, people who want treatment. The ones that are really difficult, they don't really want to help them so much. Those difficult cases are left to the jails. In the great twist of irony in the mental health world, the only entitlement to treatment that you get in this country if you have a serious mental illness is if you get arrested

and you're incompetent to stand trial, said Steve Leifman, an associate administrative judge in Florida who has marshaled reforms in Miami-Dade County, creating diversion systems designed to keep people with serious mental illness in treatment and out of court. No state has been able to escape the costs of treating those who come through the system. As of 2019, Florida spends nearly a quarter of its funds for state mental health treatment facilities, around $135 million, on just 1,500 beds, serving about 2,500 people.

California's $3 billion budget for its Department of State Hospitals covers about 12,000 people in state hospitals and jail-based mental health programs. 12,000 people in state hospitals and jail-based mental health programs. These states and others, including Colorado, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, have been sued for not having enough beds to accommodate psychiatric patients who need them. Hawaii has been trying its hand at reforms, but with marginal impact so far. Its only mental health court jail diversion program averages between just 35 and 45 participants. A forced medication program for homeless people with mental illness, started in 2013, has been stymied by civil liberties concerns, allowing only a few people to be treated.

And another program, called Act 26, is meant to hack through the sluggish bureaucracy and cut the delays for people in jails awaiting mental health exams. So far, around 120 people have been helped. I think we want to use it as much as we can appropriately, said Amy Curtis, chief administrator of the adult mental health division of the Hawaii State Department of Health. Making wholesale change often seems like a non-starter. As the homeless crisis worsens,

mental health systems are pushed to their limits. In Hawaii, the problem can often feel more pronounced to officials and caregivers who believe that the state's forgiving climate makes it a popular place to be homeless. Urban legends persist of mainland municipalities giving mentally ill homeless people one-way tickets to the islands,

where they can enjoy the sunshine and become someone else's concern. An annual assessment in 2020 found that Hawaii was nearly tied with New York for the highest rate per capita of homelessness in the nation. Certainly everyone in the system has come across patients who are lugging their suitcases around with their bag tags on, Koyanagi said, like they'd just got off the plane from somewhere. Koyanagi said, like they'd just gone off the plane from somewhere.

While he had no sense of it at first, Spreester's box 2017 arrest outside the River of Life mission would be different from the others. After spending four months in jail while his public defender applied for his 406 status, Spreester's box arrived at the admissions unit at HSH. His third time there in eight years. At least a few hospital workers recognized him,

though he was not such an outlandish presence that they remembered him well. On his first day, a psychiatrist, Ann Vernig, described a patient who seemed self-possessed, calm and lucid, very guarded, but does not exhibit any overt signs of psychosis. He had been taking antipsychotic medication in jail and was willing to continue.

It was only then, upon entering the hospital, that he was able to learn the real reason he was arrested. The HSH staff, consulting his court file, told Spreistersbach that it seemed the courts had been looking for him, based on an earlier case. In 2006, the file indicated he was pulled over on Oahu for stealing a truck. The police searched the truck and found an open beer and a glass pipe that tested positive for cocaine.

He was then apparently assigned to a drug offender probation program called HOPE, only to violate its terms in 2007. The court issued a bench warrant in 2009, and now, eight years later, the police thought they had their man. There was just one peculiarity. The name on the bench warrant, the man responsible for cocaine possession and probation violation, was not Joshua Spriestersbach, but Thomas R. Castleberry. Spriestersbach, who had always been so reticent with the doctors and nurses and social workers at HSH, now had something to say. My name is Joshua.

Everything about this bench warrant mystified him. He'd never been to rehab, he said, and he wasn't on probation for anything that he could be in violation of. Whether she believed him or not, the psychiatrist wrote that the patient came off as coherent, and she acknowledged that his current legal situation is somewhat confusing. This seemed like an understatement.

How could someone be arrested, processed, evaluated, jailed, and transferred to a state psychiatric hospital under a name that was not even his? Then again, Spreestersbach had called himself Castleberry in the past, William and Wolfgang, not Thomas, but still, he wouldn't have been the first patient

to say he was someone he wasn't. Spreestersbach's schizophrenia diagnosis made it possible to assume he wasn't a reliable narrator of his own circumstances or even his own identity. And as the days wore on, as the patient refused to admit that he was Thomas Castleberry,

it became even easier to accept that he was delusional about that, too. Within a few weeks, Priestersbach moved from the admissions unit to a psych unit, where the plan was to keep him until he was competent. No one checked to see if his fingerprints matched those of the man in the bench warrant. No one looked at the police file's photograph to see if there was a passing resemblance. No one checked the social security number he gave the police when he was arrested to see if it matched. No one tried to track down his family or friends or social workers or anyone who knew him, to ask if this man was in fact somewhere else when this incident took place. somewhere else when this incident took place.

This patient, whatever his name, was a 406, unfit to proceed. They were there to treat the person, not the name. His actual identity, it was collectively, if tacitly determined, was a police matter.

Under conditions like this, a certain drastic disconnect between staff and patients is baked into a place like HSH. The message from the top down is to not assume too much responsibility. I stayed in my lane, the former HSH staff member told me. The mindset, this staff member said, was that these really aren't your patients. Your job is to follow the policies and procedures and take care of them. You don't ask questions. You just do your job.

With no suspicion that things were amiss, the staff mingled details from Thomas Castleberry's arrest record with Joshua Spreester's box existing patient files, considering them both to be the same person. Patient denies any history of drug use, read one admissions note

from September 8th, despite his legal charges and spending time in the HOPE program. One social worker acknowledged no historical substance use assessment in his record and yet still found other aspects of his story to fit this new narrative. Mr. Castleberry states he lives in Chinatown and sleeps close to the bridge next to King Street and River Street, a known homeless area where substance use is present. It appears that he was paranoid and secretive about divulging any information. Everyone apparently overlooked the fact that not a single mention of Thomas Castleberry's 2006 arrest could be found in

Spreister's box hospital records from his 2009 and 2012 admissions. Spreister's box was caught in a new nightmare. The more he said his name was Joshua, which the records show him insisting on September 8th, September 13th, October 9th, October 16th, and November 6th, the more delusional he risked coming off. By November 17th, however, something shifted. The psychiatrist assigned to his case, Alison Garrett, seemed more inclined than others to respect the original name in his hospital files,

treating it as more than an alias. Of note, documentation obtained confirms his name is Joshua rather than William Castleberry, she wrote. But this changed nothing about his status as a patient. Without proof that he wasn't also the Castleberry on the bench warrant, he would remain at HSH

until he was restored to competency. In December 2017, a hospital report still referred to him as William Castleberry, a.k.a. Joshua Spriestersbach. For Spriestersbach, whose sense of self was already so fragmented, to be told over and over again that he was someone he wasn't, and had done things he hadn't done, and weren't like anything he'd ever done, the only sensible response may have been to shut down completely. From his first time inside the hospital, he claimed to be a political prisoner. This time around, it was alarmingly close to the truth. There was frustration, helplessness, and anger, but mostly it seemed he felt that everything he suspected about a world that was trying to control his mind had, in fact, proved true.

They were wrong, and he was right. And so in early 2018, he started refusing some of his medications. He stopped talking with Garrett at all, not a word. Her weekly reports became perfunctory. Which once again placed him into the same bureaucratic snarl. He couldn't be forcibly medicated without an order to treat from the court, but the only way to get an order to treat was if he was potentially dangerous. Spreistrussbach may not have realized that his protest strategy had a flaw this time.

The charges on the bench warrant for Thomas Castleberry weren't non-violent misdemeanors. They were felonies. This meant a 120-day cap on his time at HSH did not apply. Either the hospital would restore him to competence or he would stay there indefinitely. In early 2018,

a court-appointed examiner continued to find him unfit. He would go nowhere until something changed. This was when Spreester's box continued to find him unfit. He would go nowhere until something changed. This was when Spreister's box started to lose his composure. On March 3rd, when a psychiatric nurse offered him his evening meds, he replied sharply, You take the pill. I filed a complaint already.

The months dragged on. The one-year mark came and went. In October 2018, the judge in his case ordered a new mental fitness examination, this time with three panelists. This went nowhere. He remained unfit, and his grip on reality continued to loosen. Something finally broke the cycle in the spring of 2019. On May 23rd, after having completely stopped taking medication,

Spriestersbach met briefly with a court examiner and talked about how he believed he had a right to challenge the judge in his case to a duel. He had said things like this before during previous days. The right to duel was a motif he seemed to return to in conversation, though he never came close to following through on the notion. By now, though, he was making enough disorganized and bizarre statements, in the words of one report, to justify an application to the court for an order to treat. The court granted the order on June 4th, and he was re-prescribed antipsychotic medications,

first Zyprexa and then Haldol. He initially refused to take the pills, and so the record shows him receiving forced injections for several weeks until he agreed. The next round of exams found him unfit yet again. But during a meeting with Garrett on January 2, 2020, for apparently the first time since his admission more than two years earlier, he started to talk in greater detail about his past. An admission to a psychiatric hospital in California, followed by his move to Hawaii.

This time Garrett followed up. According to her own written account and another in his file, she searched online for the hospital in California and saw that it did, in fact, exist. Then she remembered that HSH had a record of the sign-in sheets from the Puna Health Clinic, where Spreester's box said he was an outpatient client for his first few years on the Big Island. Sure enough, there he was, in the records. One look at Thomas R. Castleberry's

arrest on Oahu in 2006, and it was clear that Spriestersbach was in Hilo at the time, on an entirely different island. It was a big moment for us as a team, her colleague told me. She said, oh my God, I think Josh was correct. I don't think it's him. Things moved quickly now. When no one had responded to a message she left with Spriester's Box public defender, Garrett called the state attorney general's office. A detective came to fingerprint him on January 15th, 2020.

That sealed it. For two years, four months, and nine days, the state hospital had confined the wrong man. We shouldn't have been keeping him all that time, the colleague of Garrett said. His tone resigned. But Josh was just one of many that come into our system and get stuck in the system, and they remained there for a long, long time. In March 2020, two months after he was discharged, something seemed to have shifted in Spreestersbach. He sat down at a computer at Safe Haven, a Honolulu shelter,

found his mother's phone number on her Facebook page, and made the call Suzanne Barden had been longing for. He had never been forcefully committed for anything close to two and a half years before, and he was ready now, finally, to reconnect But Spreester Spock's mother was too frail to care for a middle-aged man by herself Barden called her daughter, Vedanta Griffith She had been the most reliable family member in her brother's life The one to help when no one else could

Griffith was more than willing to step in, just as she always had He has a home, Griffith said more than willing to step in, just as she always had. He has a home, Griffith said on the phone with Safe Haven. He may have been homeless, but he has a family. He's coming home right now. To the extent that he was knowable at all, Griffith knew her brother better than practically anyone else. His decline over the years was something she had witnessed with dread and helplessness. What continues to baffle her, she told me, is how at least in the beginning, nothing seemed wrong. Born in Los Angeles in 1971,

the oldest of four children and the only boy, Joshua had been a popular skater kid, good with computers, mild and easy to get along with, the family's peacemaker. Griffith has had many years now to struggle to make sense of what happened to that boy. It's certainly true that, independent of Joshua, their family experienced more than its share of fractures and loss. But before that, one particular trauma is a tempting explanation for everything that came later, a convenient Freudian rosebud.

When he was about 12, Joshua learned that the man he called Dad was actually the biological father of only his three sisters. His biological father was a TV actor who parted ways with his mother after he was born. Biological father and son met a few times, but they never developed a relationship, and the father did not respond to requests for comment. relationship, and the father did not respond to requests for comment. There he was, meanwhile, every week, co-starring on the ABC drama Lottery. I don't know that anyone could expect him to handle it well, Griffith told me. Part of him was like, oh look, that's my dad. And the other part was like, oh, and where is he? His biological father's name was Ben Murphy. But his last name, before he changed it, was Castleberry.

Vedanta wonders whether Joshua had claimed that last name for himself as a promise of something he'd long been denied. In his early twenties, as he moved around towns in the Pacific Northwest, Joshua was handsome and a little eccentric, which at first did nothing but compliment his charm. His friends remember him writing out mathematical proofs and equations and expounding for hours about Wicca and Tarot. Griffith, meanwhile, started a family. Her brother would crash for days or weeks with her, playing with her kids before setting off on his own again. And when his real unspooling began, it was Griffith, more often than not, who got the call. His first psychotic episodes were brief, fleeting rages, so out of step with his mild personality, and he was so normal afterward,

and so clever, that he could talk his way out of serious trouble. I remember the nurse telling us there's no way he's schizophrenic or bipolar because there's no way that he could go so long without medication, Griffith told me. The hospitalizations started in the late 1990s, when he was in his late 20s.

Doctors prescribed what seemed like every available drug, Haldol, Seroquel, Zyprexa, Lithium, Depakote, Geodon, Risperdal. The medications seemed to make some difference until he would leave the hospital and stop taking them.

In 2003, his sister tried another tactic. She and her husband, Robert, had moved to Hawaii, and they thought Joshua, by then in his early 30s, would be more comfortable there too. They got him a cabin in Hilo and arranged for a case manager and outpatient treatment. Things went so well, Griffith remembered, that she was told that her brother needed to operate within his mental

health community, and that she should not step in if he ran into trouble. She kept calling him daily until one day in 2006, he didn't answer. She and their mother spent years calling hospitals and the police station and his caseworker. No one had seen him. His mother grew despondent. She wouldn't celebrate holidays with Griffith or her grandchildren as long as her son was in the wind. On that call in March 2020, Griffith got her first sense of why her brother had been in the hospital. The woman from Safe Haven said, I just want you to be aware of the charges, Griffith recalled.

Despite the discovery of the mistaken identity, the details were still in his case file. And I said, I don't care what you have in front of you. My brother did not steal

anybody's car, and he was not involved in drugs. I can tell you that much for certain. One of the first things Griffith did when her brother resurfaced was find

a mental health provider in Vermont, where she and her husband had recently moved. She got Joshua a plane ticket from Honolulu to Chicago, and then from Chicago to Albany, New York. He managed to make the trip. She had no idea what to expect when he arrived. He got off the plane, and he was shuffling and drooling on himself. He was so medicated, she said. He seemed so much older, frailer, and more vulnerable. But what really got her was watching him talk with his mother again. He told her that he was afraid he was never going to see her again, and he was really upset about it. Here was her

brother, only skinnier now, and less expressive after years of medication. He needed them, after all this time. Only then did she learn the reason behind those charges, the pretext that had put him away for so long. The mental health caregiver Griffith had hired asked to see her brother's discharge papers. Griffith asked HSH for them and forwarded the PDF without reading it. While only a few pages, the document revealed more than enough. A colossal bureaucratic blunder. Repeated protests by Joshua that they had the wrong man. A final admission of error. A quiet release. The caregiver called her right away. She said, I don't want to alarm you, but you need to get an attorney,

and you need to get one now. Last November, a federal lawsuit was filed on Spreester's Buck's behalf against a host of defendants in the police department, the public defender's office, and the Hawaii State Hospital. Jennifer Brown, who is an attorney in the suit and also associate director of the Hawaii Innocence Project, has written that somebody can make a good argument that Mr. Spreester's Buck was the only competent one out of all whom he had contact with over the two years and eight months

he was held illegally. She suspects not just incompetence or carelessness, but corruption. Once they had a look at Spreestersbach's hospital files and court records, his legal team saw signs

of people on both sides, the public defender and attorney general's offices, covering their tracks. They believed that no one raised an alarm after the mistaken identity was finally discovered, and even migrated Spreester's box photo to Castleberry's file before anyone else, like his family, could learn about the error.

It didn't take long to learn what became of the real Thomas R. Castleberry. He appeared to have left Hawaii around 2009, the same time the court issued the bench warrant for his probation violation, and moved first to Arizona, where from 2011 to 2014, he was charged with and jailed for various felonies. His next stop was Alaska. He recently served six years in a state prison there. So when my brother fell asleep on the sidewalk, waiting outside for the soup kitchen to open,

Griffith said, Thomas Castleberry was already incarcerated. The complaint spreads the blame around, naming the arresting officer and others at the jail for failing to compare Spreester's box name, photo, fingerprints, and date of birth to Thomas R. Castleberry's. The public defender's office,

also for failing to catch the screw-up. The city of Honolulu, for failing to train and supervise all those workers adequately. The lawyers handling his competency examinations, for not researching their client's history. And the doctors and staff of HSH, for failing to check his identity. Even Allison Garrett, the psychiatrist who uncovered the mistake after two years. Prior to January 2020, the lawsuit reads, not a single person acted on the available information to determine that Joshua was telling the truth,

that he was not Thomas R. Castleberry. The court so far has dismissed the case against the police officer and two of the public defenders. Lawyers for police, city, public defender, and hospital defendants did not respond to requests for comment or declined to comment. The case is moving slowly, with pretrial hearings expected to continue throughout this year. His lawyers have researched the genesis of the mix-up, trying to uncover the first time that Spreester's Bach and Castleberry's information was intermingled

in the police records. They found an arrest report for Spreestersbach from 2011, six years before the arrest at the soup kitchen. As in 2017, Spreestersbach was picked up on the street, and a record search connected him with the Castleberry warrant. The only difference was that the police caught the error in time, and he was released. From that point forward, the bench warrant became part of Spreester's box police file and the error took flight. Remarkably, it was never fixed. The record continued to include Spreester's box

actual social security number and date of birth along with Thomas Castleberry's state identification number. His lawyers know this because, unbelievably, the same thing happened again in 2015. Spreester's box was picked up by the police, arrested as Castleberry, because unbelievably, the same thing happened again in 2015. Spraestorsbach was picked up by the police, arrested as Castleberry, and released once the error was caught. Yet again, no one thought to correct the record.

It was a matter of time, perhaps, before the mistake would stick. Spraestorsbach's legal team includes Alphonse Gerardstein, a civil rights attorney from Ohio, best known as a counsel in the Supreme Court's same-sex marriage decision Obergefell v. Hodges. Spraystersbox lawyers aren't shy about their intention to use this case as a wedge to make bigger changes nationally to a bureaucracy that seems to fail homeless people with mental illness at every turn. The plaintiff in the complaint's pages isn't a man in need of medical treatment. He's an exploited victim of a system that dehumanizes

the vulnerable. The only crimes that Joshua has ever been charged or convicted of were crimes of poverty, the complaint reads, such as trespass and sitting or lying on public sidewalks

because he was houseless. The former HSH staff member I spoke with said the police can't take all the blame for not catching the mistake. At several points in this years-long debacle, it could have been stopped, said the staff member, who requested to not be named for fear of retaliation. Others blame budget constraints leading not just to understaffing, but also to poor record-keeping. The mistakes, in any case, keep happening.

The mistakes, in any case, keep happening. On March 15th of this year, the staff at HSH admitted a patient, a mentally ill homeless man caught trespassing at a hotel in the Waikiki area of Honolulu. According to the file, the man was in his 40s. One look at this man, though, and it seemed clear that he was decades older. The admitting psychiatrist questioned the ages. This couldn't be the man the court thought he was. It was in fact another mentally ill homeless man and repeat patient at HSH who often came in on minor offenses.

It was just plain luck that this time someone caught the mistake. A full week after the patient arrived, the error hadn't been corrected. We have another Castleberry, a senior HSH employee told me. The court orders and the police records, it's so similar Even after the mistake was discovered, the bureaucracy was not accommodating Sending the man back to the police wasn't an option They say no, the guys in jail won't take him back because he's physically here already, the employee said The simplest thing ought to be for the hospital to ask the court to officially change his paperwork. But it took two weeks

for the error to be cleared up. He would think the system would correct it right away, the employee said, after all the mess they've been through. On a bright afternoon in March, the door to Vedanta Griffith's home opened,

practically the second I rang the bell. Hi, Spreister's box said softly, looking straight at me, and it seemed at some point in the distance. Without another word, he ushered me into the living room of his sister's house, a sprawling five-bedroom on a lake, in a small tourist-heavy ski and leaf-peeping town, where Griffith and her family run a gift shop. Spreister's box was wearing a black parka inside, where Griffith and her family run a gift shop. Spreester's Bach was wearing a black parka inside with sweatpants and bare feet.

His hair was long, spilling out from under a gray newsboy cap, the sort he's always loved. His facial features were still rugged, a heavy brow, full lips, but after years

of psychotropic medications, he is more sedate. His piercing stare remains the same. While his affect was flat, he retained an independent streak. As soon as he got there, he'd gone online and ordered a bass guitar, which he spends most of the day practicing, the sound piped into headphones. He was in the middle of switching medications, a transition that his sister was eyeing warily. Griffith was there to greet me, as was their mother. As we sat and talked, Spreester's box was quiet. Filling in the lulls in conversation,

Griffith remembered her brother coming and staying with her decades ago, playing with her kids. And she remembered those first hospital visits later on, after his breakdowns, with the first grim diagnosis of schizophrenia, when Joshua would turn to her, fuming. grim diagnosis of schizophrenia, when Joshua would turn to her, fuming. Why couldn't this have happened to you, he'd said. What a waste. I'm so much smarter than you are. She would have gotten angry, but she had to agree.

He was always the smartest one in the family, she told me. From the moment he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, he was set on a path largely beyond his control. Whenever he left a psychiatric setting, he would go off his prescriptions. Without the meds to muffle the symptoms, he would break down and eventually cut himself off from his family. Because he was alone enough to withdraw unhindered, he became homeless. Because he slept outside, he got arrested. Because he had a mental illness, he was confined longer than others. Because he was not dangerous and yet non-compliant, he couldn't be treated and couldn't be released.

And because those hospitals primarily exist to restore competency, his own doctors were unable to discover that he'd been wrongly arrested, wrongly charged, and wrongly incarcerated. Now that he's home, Spreester's Bog spends most of his energy finding ways to keep to himself. He'll take long walks on the property, but he never ventures into town. After what's happened, he still worries about the police.

Answering questions, his volume never rose above a mutter. I'm fine, he'd say when asked about anything emotional. He said he remembered very little about life in Hilo or Chinatown. There was a strip about a block where you could sleep under the eaves. Or growing up.

I liked electrical engineering. Or one of the times he saw his biological father. I met him on a celebrity tennis tour. Or why he chose the first name William or Wolfgang for his Castleberry identity. I don't know. Or the Honolulu police officer who was convinced he was someone he wasn't, I don't recall him. His mother was quiet too, wary of attention perhaps. Mostly she seemed concerned about being judged for having lost her son in the first place.

We didn't know what had happened, she said, And all the calls that we made were a dead end Now she only wants to be sure he stays in touch I want him to live anywhere he wants to live as long as he's safe I just want to know where he is Thank you.